Duh. There’s Nothing Wrong in Calling All Indians Africans

When I was younger and even more stupid than I am today, I figured that the newspapers The Hindu and Hindustan Times were specifically targeted to a Hindu readership – which non-Hindus, of course, were welcome to dip into. This was mixed with the notion that these publications – one of which I would subsequently work for for more than a decade – engaged in the world through a vaguely ‘Hindu filter’. I would hold a similar misconception for a brief while when I grew a bit older with The Christian Science Monitor, an American that was not religious-themed at all despite its title.

There seems to be a similar silly ‘debate’ in the silly season over minority affairs minister Najma Heptullah’s reported utterance that there is “nothing wrong” with the term Hindu being applied equally to all citizens as a label of “national identity”. She later kind of clarified that what she has said isn’t that all Indians are Hindus, or that it’s not haraam calling all Indians ‘Hindus’, but that many people, especially in West Asia and in the countries neighbouring India still call all Indians ‘Hindis’.

(Which reminds me to ensure that one day I knock all those foreigners on their heads who insist on stating that “in India, people speak in Hindu” and spell the bespectacled one as ‘Ghandi’, ‘Gandi’ and everything else but ‘Gandhi’.)

People can pluck any kind of historical rabbit of one’s hat to argue one’s case for and against the conflation of all things geographical – and thereby nomenclatural – east of the Hindu Kush and on our side of the river Sindh//Ind/Indus before things start segueing into Bangladesh as ‘Hind’. Frankly, being het up about whether that makes all of us Hindustani — residents if not citizens of Hindustan – is as vital an issue to resolve as it is to know how many angels can dance on a pin-head.

But if people in those cookie jars who live in the Amar Chitra Katha-Ramanand Sagar universe and those holding forth inside the woody halls of the Acadame want to lunge at each other’s throats about that kind of thing – with folks like Najma Heptullah throwing their weight in at one of the corners – who am I to play party-pooper? The apples of cultural politics always made a good mash with the oranges of serious historiography.

In the real world outside, however, considering everyone a Hindu is just plain confusing. I mean, you see, say Manmohan Singh or Ratan Tata or Shah Rukh Khan or Leander Paes and you’re not going to go all gene-pool and anthropological on them and say they’re all Hindu. I mean you can, but it’s like calling all football referees ‘umpires’ and cricket umpires ‘referees’ just to make a point that umpires and referees serve the same function.

We all know that when we hear ‘Saare jahan se achha, Hindustan hamara’, one is not talking about, say, just the Hindu neighbourhoods in Ahmedabad and other regions of this non-Hindu caliphate of ours.

It’s a common enough conflation that even Salman Rushdie-haters don’t have an issue with. Also, I think it would be unfair on Hindus living outside ‘Hindustan’ – say, any of the Patels in the UK or almost every citizen of Nepal, plus those ISCKON devotees scattered across the globe from Moscow to Mozambique – to be considered Hindus by a yardstick other than ‘everyone who is Indian’.

It’s all very wunderbar to consider Hinduism as an all-embracing, all-inclusive thingummy. But I’m not too sure how that vacuum-cleaner mode of defining things goes down when someone, a ‘Hindu’ only by dint of being a Hindustani, decides to hang some other identities along with it – like, say, being an atheist, or a lesbian, or a pork-eater, or someone who’d prefer to be buried instead of being cremated, worship one invisible person instead of many imaginary persons…. that kind of thing.

As I hope will be evident to anyone with half a brain, it doesn’t matter either way whether we’re all ontologically (look it up) called Hindus or Pillowmunchers or whatever.

Going by that logic, I would like to point you to the more sane debate that’s going on while children trapped in grown-ups’ bodies hold forth on ‘Hindis’ et al: Did humans (homo sapiens) evolve and stay in Africa until 60,000 years ago, or – as two teeth samples dug up from China’s Guangxi Zhuang region in July suggest – did they first move out of Africa at least 100,000 years ago, taking a coastal route along the Arabian peninsula, India and into Australia?

Either way, all Indians/’Hindis’ then should all be called Africans. There is, technically, nothing wrong in calling all Indians Africans.